7 ms·

That's why code is not law. Intent is law.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
No, intent is not law. You can’t make a stock trade, lose money, and then sue the counter party because your intent was to make money. Accidentally killing someone can still be a crime even if you didn't intend to kill them. Intent plays a role in deciding outcomes and can influence the judgment, but intent doesn't overrule or negate law. And that’s basically what happened here: Someone read the fine print of the trading platform and realized they could use a flash loan to push the system into a space where the trade would default and the attacker would profit. So they pressed the button and the system worked as designed.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  So the way to fix this is to do what banks and stock exchanges do. Operate under a regulatory framework that has defined legal precedence to avoid someone take advantage of an unintended loophole. But at that point you are defeating the whole point of crypto being decentralized and permissionless.
  - campbel 5y ago
    bingo
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Isn't the entire $GME thing an example where someone took advantage of a situation where counterparties got way out over their skis and buyers of $GME profited well in excess of any reasonable estimation of Gamestop's promise of business results via what amounts to an unintended loophole?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - vkou 5y ago
      There is no bounded 'reasonable' estimation or expectations of how much money you can gain/lose by trading options. They are a force multiplier that can explode very spectacularly, in many different ways, and everyone involved in finance understands that. If you want your gains/losses to be reasonably bound, you have to limit yourself to buying and selling stocks directly. Unfortunately, there's not enough money in that to make a living day-trading.
    - jquery 5y ago
      The bug that allowed that to happen has essentially been patched. (Risk analysis that didn’t take into account Robinhood giving immediate margin to any rando that signs up). Robinhood very nearly melted down, Lehman Brothers style.
    - gitfan86 5y ago
      No one ever entered into any agreement where they were expected to buy stocks at reasonable prices. It is like when Kim Kardashian gets paid 50M for a 30 second add on Instagram. I may think that is unreasonable, but I don't have any contract with anyone implying that she be paid a standard actor's wage.
- b112 5y ago
  No, intent is not law. You can’t make a stock trade, lose money, and then sue the counter party because your intent was to make money Intent is certainly a big part of law. When examining classic contracts, a judge will try to also deem intent. Contracts have been thrown out, interpreted by intent of parties. An example, are the comments in the source code for this smart contract? Did everyone have opportunity to see them? It could affect a court battle...
  - landryraccoon 5y ago
    Doesn't your worldview make smart contracts pointless to begin with? If your plan is to rely on the court system, then just rely on the court system. You can write your contract on paper; smart contracts serve no purpose whatsoever then.
    - b112 5y ago
      Smart contracts are the executor, for example, imagine a smart will. It would hand out an estate in eth automatically upon death. But just as in real life, an executor can make mistakes. Traditionally, a judge may return or redistribute assets in such a case. Or claim the will was not interpreted correctly. In such cases, determining the intent of the contract is the goal of the court. Like it or not, smart contracts are not immune to contract law, civil law, courts. The first court cases, which will undoubtedly happen, will be very interesting. And moreso, different legal jurisdictions will interpret things differently. If I was writing smart contracts, I'd want some sort of boilerplate, insisting upon legal jurisdiction, maybe like an open source license, but for smart contracts. After all, once your identity is known, normal courts can compel you to do things...
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  IANAL, but intent definitely has a lot to do with law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)
  - delaaxe 5y ago
    How can you use an acronym like that and think people will take you seriously
- 323 5y ago
  > No, intent is not law. You can’t make a stock trade, lose money, and then sue the counter party because your intent was to make money. The intent (in legal sense) was to make a specific stock trade, not to make money. If the execution price was obviously incorrect, the trade will be voided for example.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Pretty sure intent is a very big part of contract law though, for obvious reasons. You can only enter into a contract intentionally.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Stock trades get broken all the time, and are settled in human dispute resolution. For instance, look up "outtrades".
- gamblor956 5y ago
  Former criminal defense lawyer here. Intent is literally the heart of criminal law. You have to have intended a crime for it to be a criminal act. In this context, this means that you had to intend to do things that would legally constitute a crime, even if you did not know that the actions/result would be a crime. For some crimes, specific intent is not required for all of the factors (for example, for statutory rape, you do not need to have intended or even known that the other person was underage; for many manslaughter charges you do not have to have intended to kill someone so long as you intended to do things that could reasonably have been expected to cause someone's death). Intent is also a fundamental factor in tort law, where intentional acts can literally quadruple the amount of damages the plaintiff may receive. And in contract law, intent is a basic foundational element of a contract. And indeed, a number of contractual disputes arise over one party intending to make money, not actually making money, and suing their counter-party as a result. And many times, the plaintiff wins... This situation is probably governed by contract law. Since those disputes turn entirely on the specific facts proving or disproving mutual intent, it's hard to say who would win in this dispute since only a small subset of the relevant facts are publicly known.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > intent is literally the heart of criminal law it is literally not. Though it is a requirement of some crimes. > You have to have intended a crime for it to be a criminal act. No, you don't, in general. You have to have intended a particular outcome if the particular crime requires that, but plenty of crimes do not have such requirements (or specifically do not apply if intent is present). E.g., “depraved heart” murder, involuntary manslaughter, and any strict liability crime or crime of negligence or recklessness.
    - thrashh 5y ago
      I find this to be a complete crazy take. Even if intent isn’t written into a specific law, the whole system is built to specifically allow intent to be considered in so many stages. Sometimes they don’t even decide to prosecute. Laws exists specifically to create a functioning society. Laws do not exist for the sake of having laws. Any sane person enforcing any kind of rule understands this. This take is like programmers getting angry when businesses don’t care about the quality the the code or something, forgetting that the whole reason people hire programmers is to solve business problems, not to write text on a computer. Total miss of the point of the exercise.
- blacksqr 5y ago
  > Accidentally killing someone can still be a crime even if you didn't intend to kill them. Maybe, but the crime wouldn't be first degree murder. Try googling "mens rea"; e.g.: "A mens rea refers to the state of mind statutorily required in order to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime. See, e.g. Staples v. United States, 511 US 600 (1994). Establishing the mens rea of an offender is usually necessary to prove guilt in a criminal trial. The prosecution typically must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the offense with a culpable state of mind." [0] [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > > Accidentally killing someone can still be a crime even if you didn't intend to kill them. > Maybe, but the crime wouldn't be first degree murder. The felony murder rule disagrees.
    - blacksqr 5y ago
      "The felony murder rule is an exception to the normal rules of homicide." https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/felony-murder/ https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/felony-mur...
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > "The felony murder rule is an exception to the normal rules of homicide." Whether or not one accepts that use of “normal”, it remains a rule and the claim that murder without specific intent is categorically not first degree, even in broad general terms is false (even before looking into all the variations in specific statutory schemes in the US, which really frustrate this kind of generalization, which takes common law rules and overgeneralizes the way things that are not part of the common law are mapped on to it.)
        blacksqr 5y ago
        I was trying to respond to the claim that "intent is not law." Your point is valid but irrelevant. Even if intent to kill is not required in all cases to get a conviction for first degree murder, under the felony murder rule it is still necessary to prove intent to commit the original crime.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  > You can’t make a stock trade, lose money, and then sue the counter party because your intent was to make money. That's too macro. Multiple steps. The intent of a stock trade is to exchange currency for share(s). That intent was fulfilled. Your _desire_ was to make money, but that's not an inherent function of the stock trade.
JackFr 5y ago
> That's why code is not law. Intent is law. What is a 'smart contract' in that universe and how is it different than a 'contract'?
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Recourse, mostly.
mise_en_place 5y ago
I think what you mean to say is that interpretation is law. Without interpretation by some (vested) third party with power, a law can never truly be enforced.

No, intent is not law. You can’t make a stock trade, lose money, and then sue the counter party because your intent was to make money. Accidentally killing someone can still be a crime even if you didn't intend to kill them. Intent plays a role in deciding outcomes and can influence the judgment, but intent doesn't overrule or negate law. And that’s basically what happened here: Someone read the fine print of the trading platform and realized they could use a flash loan to push the system into a space where the trade would default and the attacker would profit. So they pressed the button and the system worked as designed.

gitfan86 5y ago
So the way to fix this is to do what banks and stock exchanges do. Operate under a regulatory framework that has defined legal precedence to avoid someone take advantage of an unintended loophole. But at that point you are defeating the whole point of crypto being decentralized and permissionless.
- campbel 5y ago
  bingo
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Isn't the entire $GME thing an example where someone took advantage of a situation where counterparties got way out over their skis and buyers of $GME profited well in excess of any reasonable estimation of Gamestop's promise of business results via what amounts to an unintended loophole?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vkou 5y ago
    There is no bounded 'reasonable' estimation or expectations of how much money you can gain/lose by trading options. They are a force multiplier that can explode very spectacularly, in many different ways, and everyone involved in finance understands that. If you want your gains/losses to be reasonably bound, you have to limit yourself to buying and selling stocks directly. Unfortunately, there's not enough money in that to make a living day-trading.
  - jquery 5y ago
    The bug that allowed that to happen has essentially been patched. (Risk analysis that didn’t take into account Robinhood giving immediate margin to any rando that signs up). Robinhood very nearly melted down, Lehman Brothers style.
  - gitfan86 5y ago
    No one ever entered into any agreement where they were expected to buy stocks at reasonable prices. It is like when Kim Kardashian gets paid 50M for a 30 second add on Instagram. I may think that is unreasonable, but I don't have any contract with anyone implying that she be paid a standard actor's wage.
b112 5y ago
No, intent is not law. You can’t make a stock trade, lose money, and then sue the counter party because your intent was to make money Intent is certainly a big part of law. When examining classic contracts, a judge will try to also deem intent. Contracts have been thrown out, interpreted by intent of parties. An example, are the comments in the source code for this smart contract? Did everyone have opportunity to see them? It could affect a court battle...
- landryraccoon 5y ago
  Doesn't your worldview make smart contracts pointless to begin with? If your plan is to rely on the court system, then just rely on the court system. You can write your contract on paper; smart contracts serve no purpose whatsoever then.
  - b112 5y ago
    Smart contracts are the executor, for example, imagine a smart will. It would hand out an estate in eth automatically upon death. But just as in real life, an executor can make mistakes. Traditionally, a judge may return or redistribute assets in such a case. Or claim the will was not interpreted correctly. In such cases, determining the intent of the contract is the goal of the court. Like it or not, smart contracts are not immune to contract law, civil law, courts. The first court cases, which will undoubtedly happen, will be very interesting. And moreso, different legal jurisdictions will interpret things differently. If I was writing smart contracts, I'd want some sort of boilerplate, insisting upon legal jurisdiction, maybe like an open source license, but for smart contracts. After all, once your identity is known, normal courts can compel you to do things...
rossdavidh 5y ago
IANAL, but intent definitely has a lot to do with law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)
- delaaxe 5y ago
  How can you use an acronym like that and think people will take you seriously
323 5y ago
> No, intent is not law. You can’t make a stock trade, lose money, and then sue the counter party because your intent was to make money. The intent (in legal sense) was to make a specific stock trade, not to make money. If the execution price was obviously incorrect, the trade will be voided for example.
tshaddox 5y ago
Pretty sure intent is a very big part of contract law though, for obvious reasons. You can only enter into a contract intentionally.
tptacek 5y ago
Stock trades get broken all the time, and are settled in human dispute resolution. For instance, look up "outtrades".
gamblor956 5y ago
Former criminal defense lawyer here. Intent is literally the heart of criminal law. You have to have intended a crime for it to be a criminal act. In this context, this means that you had to intend to do things that would legally constitute a crime, even if you did not know that the actions/result would be a crime. For some crimes, specific intent is not required for all of the factors (for example, for statutory rape, you do not need to have intended or even known that the other person was underage; for many manslaughter charges you do not have to have intended to kill someone so long as you intended to do things that could reasonably have been expected to cause someone's death). Intent is also a fundamental factor in tort law, where intentional acts can literally quadruple the amount of damages the plaintiff may receive. And in contract law, intent is a basic foundational element of a contract. And indeed, a number of contractual disputes arise over one party intending to make money, not actually making money, and suing their counter-party as a result. And many times, the plaintiff wins... This situation is probably governed by contract law. Since those disputes turn entirely on the specific facts proving or disproving mutual intent, it's hard to say who would win in this dispute since only a small subset of the relevant facts are publicly known.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > intent is literally the heart of criminal law it is literally not. Though it is a requirement of some crimes. > You have to have intended a crime for it to be a criminal act. No, you don't, in general. You have to have intended a particular outcome if the particular crime requires that, but plenty of crimes do not have such requirements (or specifically do not apply if intent is present). E.g., “depraved heart” murder, involuntary manslaughter, and any strict liability crime or crime of negligence or recklessness.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    I find this to be a complete crazy take. Even if intent isn’t written into a specific law, the whole system is built to specifically allow intent to be considered in so many stages. Sometimes they don’t even decide to prosecute. Laws exists specifically to create a functioning society. Laws do not exist for the sake of having laws. Any sane person enforcing any kind of rule understands this. This take is like programmers getting angry when businesses don’t care about the quality the the code or something, forgetting that the whole reason people hire programmers is to solve business problems, not to write text on a computer. Total miss of the point of the exercise.
blacksqr 5y ago
> Accidentally killing someone can still be a crime even if you didn't intend to kill them. Maybe, but the crime wouldn't be first degree murder. Try googling "mens rea"; e.g.: "A mens rea refers to the state of mind statutorily required in order to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime. See, e.g. Staples v. United States, 511 US 600 (1994). Establishing the mens rea of an offender is usually necessary to prove guilt in a criminal trial. The prosecution typically must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the offense with a culpable state of mind." [0] [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > > Accidentally killing someone can still be a crime even if you didn't intend to kill them. > Maybe, but the crime wouldn't be first degree murder. The felony murder rule disagrees.
  - blacksqr 5y ago
    "The felony murder rule is an exception to the normal rules of homicide." https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/felony-murder/ https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/felony-mur...
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > "The felony murder rule is an exception to the normal rules of homicide." Whether or not one accepts that use of “normal”, it remains a rule and the claim that murder without specific intent is categorically not first degree, even in broad general terms is false (even before looking into all the variations in specific statutory schemes in the US, which really frustrate this kind of generalization, which takes common law rules and overgeneralizes the way things that are not part of the common law are mapped on to it.)
      - blacksqr 5y ago
        I was trying to respond to the claim that "intent is not law." Your point is valid but irrelevant. Even if intent to kill is not required in all cases to get a conviction for first degree murder, under the felony murder rule it is still necessary to prove intent to commit the original crime.
FireBeyond 5y ago
> You can’t make a stock trade, lose money, and then sue the counter party because your intent was to make money. That's too macro. Multiple steps. The intent of a stock trade is to exchange currency for share(s). That intent was fulfilled. Your _desire_ was to make money, but that's not an inherent function of the stock trade.

JackFr 5y ago

> That's why code is not law. Intent is law. What is a 'smart contract' in that universe and how is it different than a 'contract'?

arcticbull 5y ago
Recourse, mostly.

mise_en_place 5y ago

I think what you mean to say is that interpretation is law. Without interpretation by some (vested) third party with power, a law can never truly be enforced.